Where lies the final harbor whence we unmoor no more? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Elie Nadelman died on December 28, 1946. Within the week, the art enthusiast Lincoln Kirstein, best known as general director of the New York City Ballet, paid a visit to the sculptor’s home in Riverdale, The Bronx. The estate was a bohemian plot called Alderbrook. In the final years of his life, Nadelman had suffered many personal and professional setbacks: the loss of much of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, a withdrawal from exhibiting in the 1930s and 1940s, the forced selling off of his personal collection of European and American folk art in 1936.

Yet what Kirstein found in the attic and studio of the Nadelman home that day, lining the shelves and tables in place of his folk art collection, was an abundance of creation: hundreds of crude plaster dolls and figurines, all female, some on their backs, others suspended upside down, cast from similar molds by Nadelman but reshaped, painted, and mashed up in various ways; Henri Cartier-Bresson set about photographing these rooms in 1947.

Kirstein, who became Nadelman’s central protector and promoter in death, went on to enlarge two such figures into nineteen-foot-tall marble statues for the New York State Theater. In doing so, however, he negated their crudity and ubiquity within Nadelman’s private sculptural system. Over fifty years later, the strangeness of Nadelman’s final specimens have not diminished with time. One may say that these votive objects, in a special way, epitomized the relationship Nadelman maintained with the material world throughout his career.

Elie Nadelman was a pilgrim and a wanderer.

Elie Nadelman was a pilgrim and a wanderer. As a pilgrim he believed that there could be idealism in form. As a wanderer he never found it. Instead, he collected the mental and physical charms and bric-à-brac that passed him on the route of his quixotic journey. Aesthetically, ethnically, and geographically he was both modernism’s gypsy and its pack rat. His sources of influence came from the far-off reaches of early classical and Hellenistic Greece, from the polychrome woodwork of Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemenschneider, from the folk art, advertisements, and set pieces of the American circus and vaudeville, from Polish peasant art, from Asian and Egyptian sculpture. Ethnically, Nadelman was born in 1882 into a Polish family in the nation that did not at the time exist; he was an assimilated Jew in a country where Polish nationalism was hostile to Jewish life; he was raised in a well-off and elegant household, classically educated at the Warsaw Gymnasium and the Warsaw School of Drawing, a subject of the Tsar, who left for Munich and Paris in 1904 and New York in 1914 never to return.

Nadelman’s fortunes were peripatetic and fleeting. He found early acclaim in Paris as a young rival to Picasso and in New York as an equal to Gaston Lachaise. Handsome and reserved, he married Viola Speiss Flannery, a rich American widow, in 1919. Following a decade in the social elite, he lost much of his wealth in the Great Depression, the banks foreclosed on his Upper East Side townhouse, and he nearly lost Alderbrook. It was here in the 1920s that he and Viola had amassed one of the first large collections of American folk art, only to lose it in 1936. While producing some of the most personal and affecting pieces of his career, like the plaster figurines uncovered by Kirstein, Nadelman’s artistic reputation fell into critical neglect. At the same time, his Polish family and childhood community were falling victims to the Nazi death machine. Besieged by heart problems in early 1946, this survivor across the Atlantic committed suicide by slitting his wrists and bleeding to death in the bathtub of his Bronx home.

Nadelman’s life could be the material of a lurid novel. Yet his eclecticism, driven experimentation, and deep traditionalism made him a touchstone sculptor in twentieth-century art, although his legacy remains unfulfilled and widely unknown. Despite a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, with a catalogue by Kirstein (who organized the show), and a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, with a catalogue by John Baur, Nadelman is unforthcoming even in death.

It’s hard then to say what effect the Whitney Museum’s current exhibition, with an excellent, well-researched catalogue essay by Barbara Haskell, will have on Nadelman’s future reputation.¹ For anyone concerned about the future of art, Nadelman is one of American art’s last untapped resources. His awareness of aesthetic history was on par with Ezra Pound’s and his sophistication with T. S. Eliot’s. Yet the Whitney’s flimsy attempt to recast Nadelman as a “sculptor of modern life” who presaged pop art (!) and minimalism (?) through an appreciation of high and low culture, or one who made postmodern gestures during the height of modernism, is more than misleading. It is disheartening. This is the singular disappointment of the show (and I ask, from whom at the Whitney does this narrow interpretation always come?). In his handling of form and the importance he placed upon objects, Nadelman was among the most traditional of sculptors and someone whose idealization of the art object would be anathema to the kitsch and conceptual products of the 1960s and 1970s. He matched his rigor with an inquisitiveness and a reach that extended beyond the purview of almost any other twentieth-century artist. He was anything but pop.

In The Enchafèd Flood, his three critical essays on the romantic spirit, W. H. Auden understood the polemical posture of the romantic artist.

Throughout Nadelman’s changing styles and materials—plaster, papier-mâché, bronze, marble, wood, terra-cotta—he maintained a constancy and doggedness of artistic purpose even if this unity was based on abnegation and reinvention. In his struggle to break with the art of his own generation and that of the immediate past, he reached deep, into forgotten history, and wide, bypassing the systems of the academy.

Nadelman believed in the perfectibility of the curve as the unit of artistic creation. His early ink sketches from 1907 to 1909 that fill the first rooms at the Whitney, often drawing out the female form with the barest economy of line and hatchmark, testify to his persistence (and also announce a proto-cubist sensibility). The curve informed the smooth rounding of form, at times Maillol-esque, that one finds in nearly all of Nadelman’s plastic work. Yet while he pursued the notion of idealism in art, he went against the belief that either natural or personal spiritualism could be contained in the art object itself, placing him at odds with Wassily Kandinsky and his On the Spiritual in Art (1912), as well as with others in the movements towards both expressionism and pure abstraction. It sent Nadelman on his own course. Meyer Schapiro once wrote about Nadelman that

Sculpture in twentieth-century art seemed to go one of two ways: with Lachaise, Giacometti, and (figurative) Picasso towards hand-molded self-expression, and with Brancusi and (abstract) Picasso towards an untouchable, gleaming, machine-like perfectionism. Nadelman pursued a third route. Although approaching form with the sensibility and nuance of a fine artist, he drew on the vernacular tradition of the artisan and its culture of useful objects and multiple production. Even the classical heads guarding the start of the Whitney show, seemingly inconsistent with most people’s histories of modernism (except for those raised within Germany’s classicizing culture), resemble more the Roman copies of Praxiteles’ sculptures than their Greek originals. Nadelman regularized the features of the head from the angular and expressive work of 1908 (like his raffish plaster Head, recorded in a photo, since destroyed) down to the smoothed-out haircuts, braids, and barrettes of 1910 to 1913 (the many Classical Heads of c. 1910–11).

As a pilgrim he believed that there could be idealism in form.

The usefulness of these objects was made all the more real when Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics magnate, purchased Nadelman’s entire run of his 1911 London show to display in her salons as exemplars of female beauty. The figures she bought are so smooth that they look, can we say, even worn down with an imagined history of wear and tear. This is underscored by the illusion at the necklines of objects that had cracked off of marble bodies, now lost. These are sculptures specifically designed to resemble, if not impersonate, objects with a shop-worn past.

Once in the United States, Nadelman followed the lines of inquiry he developed in Paris but incorporated a new fascination with folk and peasant art. One early development, perhaps almost too obvious in its significance, was Nadelman’s reassigning of Mercury’s classical helmet (Mercury Petassos I & II[c. 1914]) into a gentleman’s bowler hat. His Man in the Open Air (c. 1915) remains a masterpiece of the period. With the application of a simplified bow tie, Nadelman transformed the classical figure into the shadow of a modern man: his diminutive size and shape, his flattened forms (a tree-branch intersects his right arm), and his worn-down surface at the shoulders, torso, and hat enable this sculpture to occupy positions as both a human resemblance and a specific object. A rapid outpouring of creativity soon followed as Nadelman produced a menagerie of barkers, dancers, musicians, and circus performers in wood, plaster, and metal, many polychromed with variegated applications of paint, seemingly capturing a vernacular of weather-beaten, hand-rubbed, and chipped genre figures.

These critical successes, so iconically Nadelman’s (such as Tango, c. 1920–24), did not extend past 1925.

One might argue that the production to follow was his most important aesthetically, even if it was not widely viewed or collected. This phase began with the eerie galvano-plastiques (for example, Seated Woman with Raised Leg, c. 1925–26) and led up to Nadelman’s late-style plaster figurines. In Elie Nadelman(Eakins Press), Lincoln Kirstein’s 1973 monograph of the artist that was twenty-five years in the making and is still the most important piece of Nadelman scholarship (only 3075 copies of the lavish title were ever printed), Kirstein framed the argument in this way:

“Was Nadelman,” asks Kirstein, “only a self-conscious artist, or a soul attempting to probe consciousness in a self?” On this the great artist remains silent.

Notes
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